August 20, 2002, 4:16 p.m.
listening: Concrete Blonde, Free
cassette (which I've had since the
early '90s), The Numbers CD
Searching for a Lauren Berlant quote in last year's composition book,
I stumbled across a hastily-scrawled note, from a lazy summer
afternoon in Modern Times Bookstore on Valencia. This is from the back
blurb of Annie Sprinkle's latest contribution to sex radical literature
called Hardcore From the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits, and Politics
of Sex in Performance:
What happens to the notions of the pornographic when a female
performer subverts the conventional models of porn representation by
reclaiming the agency of her own body?....By locating her discourse on
her own body she renders exploitation impossible and refers to herself
as a postpornmodernist.
I remember scribbling this quote into my
notebook with mingled awe and annoyance -- awe, because it's truly awful
prose, and annoyance, because it means nothing. (And not because of the
terms necessarily, because as I've stated before, I have no problem with
"jargon," but they're totally used wrong
. It's as if the blurb writer input these terms into a
Babelfish program to randomize her sentences.) When is discourse not inscribed on the body? Does her body wield
a corporeal agency in and of itself? Do bodies which are "reclaimed"
remove themselves from circulation within other discourses not
authorized by the
female performer? How is this concept "postmodernist," when in
its deployment here it reclaims the modernist mythology of
the originality of the avante-garde*, the transparency of author-intent, and the
individual genius?
I won't rehearse my other criqitues of sex
radical discourse and its intimate relationship to both liberal
democratic and consumer-driven models of democracy, or its seeming-sibling relationship to selp-help literature as strategies
of enlisting subjects in the pursuit of self-improvment and "self-love" while
denying or evading social or structural relations. (Uh, nevermind.) But funny, I do end up finding
the Lauren Berlant quote from a British conference on sexualities, medias, and
technologies in my composition book, and it reads, "Yes, disorganized capitalism does open up some
new venues for sexual expression, but what is
it in relation to? On-line, avatars may fuck each
other in new and interesting orifices, but what is that in
relation to?"
Dude, seriously.
* In fact, art historian Rosalind Krauss wrote a monograph called
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths
(MIT Press, 1995).